


Whispers Of Some Quiet Conversation

by canismajr



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Africa by Toto, F/M, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Wakanda (Marvel), Yeah you read that right, and before you ask yes i do question my life and my choices every damn day of my life, christ where did my parents go wrong, main pairing is steve/bucky nat/clint is a side pairing and may not even come up, not technically songfic, steve rogers has Big Feelings, this is inspired by africa by toto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-18 18:22:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17585963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canismajr/pseuds/canismajr
Summary: i woke up in a cold sweat at 2am with the sentence "stevebucky post civil war pre infinity war songfic set to africa by toto" running circuits through my sick little mind and then i couldn't stop thinking about it so here we areto summarise: the moments between the movies. Steve is there when Bucky wakes up.





	1. The Drums Echoing Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> be real with yourself the song fits them perfectly

It seems like forever and a day has passed when he finally gets the call.

 

Bucky chose, not so long ago, to return to cryo. And he’d been so entirely robbed of choice for such an unimaginably long time that Steve couldn’t find it in himself to put up a protest. He wished he could say it didn’t even occur to him. But walking away from a fight is still new to him, and there is no absence of drive - instead he is near overflowing with the opposite. His mouth almost always tastes bitter, these days. Adrenaline heady and constant and flavouring every breath. Contrary, he’d always been called. A _punk_. History didn’t remember that. History didn’t remember much of anything past what the propaganda circuit had written down. Monkey costume and all.

 

He had wanted, terribly, reproachfully, to head that fight.

 

Bucky _chose_ to go back into cryo.

 

At first Steve hadn’t been able to understand it. Hell if he did, even now. If he was being honest with himself, he didn’t really _want_ to understand it. He wanted to understand _Bucky_ — of course he did. He wanted to relearn every aspect of him, old, new, damaged, patched over or scrubbed completely. But he also trusted him with a gut deep certainty that rebelled entirely against the thought of _fridging_ him - just like HYDRA had done - until they could figure out how to control him better.

 

“I can’t trust my own mind” he’d said. And Steve had set his teeth against a barrage of protestations. As a counter-argument to over seventy years of brainwashing, physical and mental conditioning, and torture go;“You don’t have to -- trust _me_ instead” is _probably_ a little weak. And selfish, besides that. Bucky brought out such conflicting things in him. Such human things. And besides that, however stalwart it sounded in his head, he’s pretty sure it’d come out plaintive. That’s not the kinda case he wanted to make. That’s not fair. So, he smiled tightly and forced his hands down and loose into his lap and tries not to give it all away with a hangdog look — _I trust you. I trust you. To the end of the line. To the bottom of the Potomac. Clasp your hands around my throat and I’ll welcome your touch._

 

He cleared his throat. Bucky sat across from him, dressed in white. He doesn’t look calm so much as resolute. He is looking at his hand. At the empty space parallel to it.

 

“Until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head,” Bucky had said carefully, “I think going under is the best thing.” His eyes cut up to Steve. “For everyone. _”_

 

Like _this_ is the clear solution. Steve inclined his head so he has an momentary reprieve to blink away the burning in his eyes and actively tries to coach his jaw into loosening, clenched as it is, he can hear his teeth creaking. It’s futile, and he feels the give of a few, stress fractures splintering through them like pine limbs snapping in winter. Shotgun cracks amplified by air so still as to be frozen. They knit together again, damage undone, and he swiped his tongue absently along the bottom row. Bucky levelled him with a last discerning look. Long, and with the awful same tilt to his head, and then he leaned back. _We’ll be having words, you and I._ Steve gathered from those shrewd eyes. And he shot back, _You bet we will. You better fucking believe we’ll be having words._

 

Bucky hadn't quite smiled, but the line of his mouth pulled into something easier, something Steve recognised.

 

He hated the hiss of the machine as Bucky settled into it. He hated the shadows the cold overhead lights cast across his features, hated the minute twitching of his eyes behind his closed eyelids. He wasn't tense, but he certainly couldn't be called relaxed. He held himself in check. His muscles spasmed, just slightly, against the gentle restraints. And then the door slid closed.

 

The flash-freeze pallor cloaked him, colour leached away in a instant, the glass frosting till he’s a wavy edged impression beneath it and clearing just as quick, leaving a gaunt and lifeless thing, uglier for its familiarity.

 

 _Is it anything like being in the ice?_ The thought is an intriguing, if disquieting one. Steve doesn’t remember much past the first shocking impression of cold. Shadows maybe, just faint. No colour. The cold doesn’t allow for colour. The thought of the ice leaves him, no surprise, cold. A clammy sweat gathers at the nape of his neck. He looks hard at the cryo pod and doesn’t understand.

 

Obviously it was more complex than just, locking Bucky away until HYDRA is razed unto the corrupt dirt from which it grew, and salting the earth behind it. He wants Bucky have as much autonomy as possible, and removing latent HYDRA triggers is _essential_ to that, but _fuck_. Did he have to go into cryo, while Shuri dug through the shambles of his head and rooted out all of HYDRA's final, insidious, tendrils?

And the heart of it — _I just got you back_ , he’d wanted to say. Quiet enough that Bucky’d have to lean his head close to Steve’s just to hear him. Soft, like he could gentle that awful, cornered thing that lived behind Bucky’s eyes with his voice, with a look. _Please don’t leave me behind again._

 

He’s gotta shake himself out of it. He pushes down on the thoughts. That’s not fair, he knows, it’s not fair on either of them. So he didn’t say it. He thinks Bucky probably read it in his face anyway.

 

Bucky had chosen cryo. And all the fight in Steve just, stuttered. There was a battle here. If he'd asked, if he'd said, “God, Buck, I can’t do this alone please don’t leave me alone-“

 

Well. He’s pretty sure he’d’ve won it. But what would he have lost in the long run?

 

A long dormant thread in Steve is, jarringly, plucked. A scab peeled off. He’s left raw.

 

Steve isn’t a soft man. Kind, yes. Empathetic, and fair-minded? Certainly. But the world that shaped him had left very little room for _softness_.

 

Even so. Even when every day was a fresh battlefield, when being sick and disabled and 90 pounds soaking wet with a chip the size of Brooklyn on his shoulder had equaled, in the mind of his government, his society, his neighbors and the fists he met in back-alleys, a state of lesser personhood — something in him had retained a degree of elasticity. That elasticity had been claimed, and charmed like a junkyard mongrel into showing its belly by a boy just as scrappy and twice as charming as Steve himself. By James “Bucky” Barnes and the shine he took to Steve when he was still just a slip of a thing, all cowlicks and burning eyes and shoulder blades that poked through his shirt like vestigial wings.

 

He’d seen that fire, and some part of him had known it for what it could be. He stoked it, revelled in it, nursed the asthmatic flicker of it. _He’s trouble, that Rogers boy,_ had been the neighbourhood consensus. And Bucky’d been more than happy to meet that challenge, head-first and howling. Offer that first hand up with a cocked and gap-toothed smile.

There’s nothing forgiving about walking through fire, but nonetheless Bucky had stripped off his boots and walked across live coals, matched Steve step for step. _Leave me here. I can get by on my own_ . Steve’d said, snarled, hacked out and shouted, he’d shrugged Bucky’s hand off his shoulder, he’d stormed away again and again and the response - translation always the same, whatever form it took — _Not without you. I know you can get by alone, but you don’t have to._

 

So — Any softness Steve had was spoken for. When Bucky fell, Steve Rogers faltered, and it was the Captain who picked his body up and marched it on. It was no wonder that nobody remembered Steve, here, in the 21st century. All that was left of him was a stalwart paragon wearing his face. Cap, they called him. Reduced him to. He came swinging out of the ice and he didn’t recognise the world he found himself in. The world didn’t recognise him either.

 

He was distant, this version of Bucky. Guarded. And Steve couldn't help but resent that just a touch. There hasn't been a single moment when he is not actively restraining himself from reaching out, to reassure himself that Bucky is _real_ is _here_ is _in-the-flesh_ , is _warm_ under his hands, all the while, Bucky can slip his eyes right over Steve, to a neutral point just past his shoulder, all easy like that. Like Steve hadn’t taken on the world and _won_ just for him. And -- _there_ it is. The dregs of WW2 still lurking in him. Bitter like coffee grounds. Post-Azzano wells up from some ugly place in him, one buried far, far, down. He’d caught the difference in Bucky even back then. The new coolness, the shedding of some afore fundamental layer. He’d looked into the middle distance over Steve’s new shoulder back then, too. Maybe he'd just never gotten a chance to get used to Steve's new body. God knows Steve never really did. Even now, he sometimes wakes up and the first thing he does is scrabble for his inhaler. Back then, when Steve said his name, his eyes first snapped to a point around about his breastbone. Around about as tall as he’d once stood, heels dug in against a stiff breeze.  Steve is sick with how easy it was to ignore that. To take the reassurance that Bucky was fine, had his six, at face value. Hindsight is 20/20, and eidetic memory is cruel.

 

The role reversal aches, back then and still, because Bucky never gives him the option to pick up any slack. _You got me_ , Steve desperately wants to tell him. _You got me from the dust we came from, the dust you brushed from my flank when you picked me up off the ground, you got me to the dust unto which we all return._ The memories play behind his eyes like projector reels. _You don’t gotta get by on your own._

But all he can really do, as Peggy had put it, is allow Bucky the dignity of his choice. All he can hope is that one day, when that wash of red inside Bucky eases, he’ll accept that it’s Steve’s turn. It’s a pipe dream, but Steve thinks, sometimes, it’s okay to be greedy like that. Greedy with hope, hoarding possibility. It’s easy, with Bucky a bare few metres away from him. _Please,_ he thinks. _Don’t you see all the places we’re grown together?_ Again and again he thinks, _Please,_ losing track of what it is he’s even begging for.

 

He couldn’t hide anything from Bucky, before. Not that subtlety had ever really been his strong suit, but even past that. Bucky could take one long look at him and the truth’d be spilling out of him before he even knew his mouth was open. Sometimes he didn’t even need to speak. It was enough to look, to be known, in ways no-one before or since -- bar his mother, and maybe Peggy, if they’d had more time -- had grasped.

 

But _before_ was a long, _long_ time ago. You can love someone without really knowing them, you have to - because people change. They evolve in ways that, sometimes, are hard to recognise. You have to look hard past that, past the static and distraction of new foliage and into the little grain at the core of them, the one that deep reaching roots and fickle new growths alike sprout from. Once you know the look of a person that deep you never forget them. Not truly. Because that seed is grafted to yours, now, too. You grow with and into one another, in the way of trees, if you twine their green branches together.

 

It had been hard at first, pressing through that thorny new growth. Thickets razed and seeded anew by first the Soviets, and then HYDRA as it pleased them. Groves upon groves of parasitic grafts sprung up wild and choking around the barest and hardiest dregs of Bucky. Of _Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038._ Of the man on the bridge -- “ _S-Steve?_ ”, “ _I knew him-_ ” “ _I thought you were smaller-_ ” “ _You used to wear newspaper, in your shoes-_ ” “My name is _Bucky--_ ”

 

Steve can feel those woody thorns in his throat when he thinks about it too long. He’s always been one to pull the thread, once it’s been worked loose. Usually he’s the one to work it loose. _This isn’t freedom_ , he thinks, back in the Triskelion, eye to eye with Nick Fury and finding he doesn’t know who he’s looking at. _This is fear._

 

He’s afraid too. He was then, but the anger had overtaken that and it had been in a rush of red and blurred movement and gunshot upon gunshot upon gunshot and all of a sudden the world was quiet again. Quiet in the way of a storm’s eye. Deadened, and a hairsbreadth from a riptide edge of chaos. Steve is eye to eye with the Winter Soldier, - _a ghost, you’ll never find him, I need the casualty list from Azzano, Please tell me if he’s alive, a scream that echoes and echoes off the sides of the gorge, into and around Steve’s head for far longer than it should_ \- and he finds he knows who he’s looking at.

 

 _Oh_. He thinks. _I know you._ _I knew you. I knew him._

 

And the fragile imitation of life Steve’d begun to build was in ruins around him. The thread was red, and leading him through the labyrinth. Only he was the one chasing the monster, in this case. A turned around Theseus with a ball of bloody yarn tracking around blind corners, over-through-and-under dead ends. The only genius at the center of this maze was a mad one, and long dead at that. It was the walls themselves Steve was concerned with. The walls, the echo, and his own bare hands. They would crumble just as surely as they were built, until there was no shadows for any hideous last tendril to grasp, and be cloaked in. Until he could bring Bucky home. No matter that he hadn’t built one yet. Easier with shared life experience, he reckoned. With a strength equal to his own. With someone he could hold and not need to worry about checking his grip.

 

The Winter Soldier pulls him from the river, and all of a sudden Steve is shaking down the whole damn world. As though Bucky might fall from a hidden pocket like so much spare change. He took the hint, eventually. It wasn’t that you _couldn’t_ find someone who didn’t want to be found, it was that Bucky _didn’t want_ to be found. He didn’t want to be found, and hell if Steve was letting anyone override even his smallest, or most wrenching, or _pig-fucking-headed,_ choices. Either he’d come back to Steve, or he’d let Steve come across him. The thread was there, and it was red, but it wasn’t the arterial shade of the last. It was old blood, from deep, and near black with all that was packed into it. The kinda blood you hope to god you don’t see on your hands, cos it means something deep and vital has been pierced. Something you can’t live without. Of course, in the way of these things, the plan promptly derailed itself and Steve found himself halfway up shit creek and scrabbling for a paddle.

 

He hadn't followed the thread, but he always came back to it. Reassured himself that it was still there. It was a strange grey area that he occupied for a time. It was preferable to the purgatorial half-life he'd found himself going through the motions of, in the period after the ice and before Shield had come up dirty. But infinitely more frustrating, because now he knew what else there was. What else he might have. All that was missing, and that could be found. That limbo, and all its yearning, had been the status quo for a time. Natasha could make as many jokes as she liked about setting lighted candles in his window, the wry little twist to her mouth told him she was as good as serious. She, like the truth, might not be all things to all people all the time, but she gave a good impression of it. He was beginning to see the deeper, more permanent roots of her. They were elusive, with mis-leads planted in increments among those he managed to glimpse, but that tiny seed held fast. A jealous copse ringed around it, but whatever rare sliver he managed to catch through her own cultivated and wary thornbrush, it was kindred. They were both, he decided, in the wrong business.

 

All he had was candles in the window. All he could do was keep on. That’s all he’s ever really known to do. That was the foundation of it all. You always stand up, and once you’re on your feet? You keep on. This time, though, it wasn’t the soldier in Steve that pushed him up and walked it off. It was the kid from Brooklyn, the one who was too dumb to run away from a fight. It was Sarah Roger’s voice in his head, and the phantom touch of her hands - gentle through his hair, slow circles on his back.

 

It was Bucky, walking through fire every damn day of his life, just to keep Steve company.

 

So he clamped down on _all that._  Bucky goes into Cryo, and Steve smiles, thanks T’Challa like he ain’t leaving something of himself frozen solid with Bucky in there. Like part of him isn’t waiting, still, since 1945, to thaw.

 

And then life goes on. He lives and dies with each new update. Until finally, the Call comes in.

 

T’Challa is at the other end, like he doesnt have more important things to do than personally cater to Steve’s neurotic bullshit. His voice is layered in understanding, though. And Steve recognises, as with Sam, and Natasha, a kindred root anchored firm and robust in his core.

There’s something appealing about the cadence of T’Challa’s voice, a rightful assurance, tempered and warm, coiled through with strength. When he speaks, you want to listen.

 

Sometimes Steve doesn’t recognise the voice that comes out of his own mouth. The brassy articulation springs out like he’s still hot under stage lights, pace to pace with the USO showgirls. It’s Captain America’s voice, on beat through the tongue twister, _every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guys gun!_ Fist cocked to clock Hitler for the 107th time. Bucky’d looked at him askance when that voice made its first appearance. Startled a little, when he tracked the source of the polished, newscaster sounding fuck to _Steve_ . He didn’t say anything though. It was _Bucky_. He didn’t need to. Steve’d flushed a little, all of a sudden self-conscious. He dialled back the voice around Bucky, but more than once he caught the tail-end of some indeterminate expression sliding from his face, just as Steve cast an eye at him. Sometimes he was almost sure it was a smirk. More often, though, he thought it was probably a frown.

 

Steve was pure Brooklyn when it was just him and the Howlies. As soon as he stepped away from the command tents his accent thickened up like the New York smog’d taken up residence in his lungs and the words were coming out coated over. It was more often than not Cap’s voice that came out when he spoke, nowadays. He has to try for his smoggy twang now. Has to rifle through his tamped down guts to find it.

 

He snaps back into the present when the phone rings, his heart jolting in his chest at the caller ID. He answers.

 

"It is time, Captain,” T’Challa's voice comes in smooth over the line. “Would you like to be here, when he wakes?”

 

Steve takes in a breath that reaches a fresh depth of lung he hadn’t realised he possessed. He holds it, and the adrenaline that floods through him could almost be sweet.

 

He clears his throat, and Brooklyn colours the words: “I’m on my way.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. The stars that guide me towards salvation

The first order of business is hauling ass.

 

He’s glad the call didn’t come during a mission or a briefing or on a day when he was supposed to meet up with Sam or Nat and reassure them that -- yes, he was coping. No Sam I don’t need a tissue. Or therapy. Thank you, Nat, but you’re well aware that I can’t get drunk. If you hand me one more glass of vodka like it’s water and laugh at me with your eyes when it comes out my nose I am going to aim it at you. 

 

He updates them, but only once he’s on the way. Natasha sends back a stream of emoticons that may as well be hieroglyphics but Steve is pretty sure he’s supposed to interpret the general theme of it as, maybe, congratulations? It’s possible she’s laughing at him again. Probable, in fact. 

 

It’s preferable to the pity that used to colour their interactions. She was the first among the few to see past the  _ star spangled man with a plan _ and through to the reeling 26 year old, seventy years removed from everything he’d ever known, fresh from a war, pulled from what he intended to be his grave, and compressed under the weight of a whole new world. A modern Atlas.

 

It was complicated, between them. At first their commonality had made things difficult, rather than easier. She could see him truer than most, but she had her own agenda, always, and her own fledgling defections from the roles that she found herself more and more weary of playing. 

First came Shield, and with it — though on a more familiar level — Clint, and a cat who she did not name, but who waited at the window of her prime safe house by a china dish, and who wound itself around her legs no matter who she happened to be wearing on any given day. 

 

She still has a different hairstyle every time he sees her, but she tends with greater frequency to the wavy bob he’d first met her with, and a rusty shade of red - a touch softer than the vermillion riot that trailed her like a flag through the first of their team assignments. The pity isn’t gone, per se, but it’s evolved into something more like camaraderie. They have both — the quiet understanding between them goes — been in the wrong business for a long, long time. She is as tired of shedding her skin as he is of war. Knowing that eases something in both of them.

 

Sam replies with an ETA. He understands the blunt parts, the ones Natasha can’t look at without trying to find some kind of edge. He knows what it is to reach for someone, and miss. And that, seemingly, is that. 

 

They were both up there just to watch. That’s the understanding between them. 

 

Sam asks questions when he knows Steve needs to hold himself accountable, and offers answers when he either can’t bring himself to, or else he’s pulling more than his own fair weight. He keeps him steady. He reminds him that, at the end of the day? He’s  _ human _ . He’s  _ not _ Atlas, despite the skies that might be falling on any given day.

 

Sam had put it just right, he does everything Steve does, only slower.

 

He leaves Natasha’s message alone, and hits Sam back with his own ETA. From there, all he can do is settle back in his seat and watch the stars cycle by. 

 

There’s a thin rosy haze at the far edge of the world, and for a moment Steve can’t remember if he’s chasing the sun or if it’s warming his heels. He’s spent most of his life chasing it, in some manner or another. He thinks it’s probably time that he caught up. He’s tired, after all. Tired deep, right down into the parts of him that the sun couldn’t hope to reach, let alone warm. 

 

But catching the sun, or outrunning it, doesn’t seem so vital anymore. He thinks he might like to sit under it. Turn his face to it, be gentled and doused in it’s light. 

 

Either way, someone’s waiting out there for him, out past the edge of the world. He missed one date, and finds himself disinclined to repeat the mistake.

  
His eyes track periodically back to the clock. The stars on their inexorable axes wheel by, and a fledgling softness unfurls the first of its downy feathers in his breast.  _ Finally _ , something in him sighs. Abstract enough to be something like hope, rather than anything coherent.  _ Finally, I can come home from war.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> issa short one, but we're jus getting everything set up okay? let me know what you think


	3. The Things We Never Had

It’s barely dawn when the Quinjet enters Wakandan airspace. He’s glad no one’s with him in the cockpit to see his flinch when he guides it through the barrier. There’s something discomfortingly familiar about it. Even though he  _ knows _ he’s not driving himself into the ground; he still gets a panicky flash in his gut. The kind he should’ve felt when he crashed the Valkyrie. But the only thing in him then had been a sorrow that somehow managed to simultaneously hollow him out, and swell up inside him until his entrails felt like they were writhing up his throat. Really, the only similarity is that he’d kinda thought he was flying back to Bucky then, too. 

 

He’d closed his eyes as the barrier approached, and once he’s through there is no where to look but forward. Wakanda spreads out before him, full of impossible things. Thing he couldn’t even have imagined, just a few months ago. 

 

The sky is light in that luminous way found in the moments just as the sun is cresting the horizon. There are pale fingers of light, still tentative, reaching through the air and  skimming the edges of the landscape. He flies low over Wakanda, careful not to pass over any of the major settlements until he reaches the citadel. He doesn’t want to disturb the peace. 

 

A breeze heavy with moisture stirs through Steve’s hair while he waits for the door of the Quinjet to fully descend, down to where T’Challa is waiting for him on the airstrip. The sun is low in the sky, and yet to warm the air through. There is humidity that speaks to the heat that will come in later hours. He starts forward.

 

“Captain,” T’challa greets Steve with a nod, his serious eyes warm. The Dora Milaje that flank him watch Steve with guarded eyes. He returns T’challa’s nod with a respectful inclination of his head, touching his right hand to his sternum. 

 

“King T’Challa,” he says, “Thank you for calling.” T’Challa nods again, and half turns -- indicating with an arm towards the palace. Steve takes a breath and walks down the final stretch of ramp. He meets Okoye’s eyes and nods at her, too. She remains impassive, but shifts aside to allow him closer. He swallows, and falls into step beside T’Challa. His voice turns wry, “I… didn’t realise he'd be-" there's a brief pause as he tries to find an approprioate word. "-Ready, so soon.” It's a lame finish, and one he inwardly grimaces at, but T'challa seems unfazed. If anything, he seems amused. 

 

In fact, he laughs, “Yes,” T'challa looks back towards the Citadel, clasping his hands at the small of his back. “My sister works quickly, especially when a project captures her attention as thoroughly as Mr Barnes has." His expression turns droll. " I think she has become quite fond of him.” 

 

“Figures,” Steve huffs, tickled despite himself. He finds himself peering up at the palace with T’challa as start forward. It’s framed behind in rising sun, and Steve wonders if he will ever get used to the remarkable beauty of this place. The balmy air, the incredible technology, the lush sprawl of landscape that lies all around them. He’s absorbed by it. There is a strange ache that accompanies the thought of Bucky amongst this land, and these people. He recognises it as yearning. It is an emotion he is unfortunate enough to be intimately familiar with.

 

There’s so much riding on these next few hours. An impossible array of choices to be made. A lifetime’s worth, or two. 

 

“He always was a charmer,” he recalls, voice warm with nostalgia. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it carries through even when he’s on ice.” 

 

T’Challa raises a long-suffering eyebrow, “I think she is more fascinated by the challenge he represents.” He says, and smiles suddenly, with a fond shake of his head. “As well as the very convenient captive audience.” At that, Steve can’t help but laugh. He’s gladder to be back in Wakanda than he realised he would be. There's something in the air, here. Something that thrives, and in breathing it in - makes him feel as though he could, too. 

Besides that, it’s just an amusing image. Bucky would be aghast at not only the affront to his tender pride, but at the sheer degree of what, way back when, would’ve been  _ impossible _ science that Shuri must be bouncing off him, while he can’t even enjoy it. The sci-fi nerd had been strong with Bucky, although with everything he has undergone, Steve has an inkling that some of his old boyish glee in regards to:  _ It’s a car that flies, Stevie!  _ might have soured, just a little. Probably more than just a little. He hopes that isn’t the case, but he’s prepared for it. There’s any number of possibilities he’s prepared for. Some… more than others. The humour fades, replaced by a familiar stoic melancholy.  _ Come what may, _ he thinks. He will weather it. This is not the coldest hour he has bowed his head against and soldiered on through. But the hairsbreadth separation it fields from a truer time in the sun than he has ever known makes it crueler. There is  _ so much _ riding on these next few hours.

 

That line of thought has no place under this lightening sky. He shakes it off, and thinks instead of Bucky the way he was. Of all the ways similar and foreign, that he will be. He layers levity into his voice, “I wouldn’t tell him that.” 

 

It’s then that they reach the entrance to the medical wing and a tightness begins to grow in Steve’s chest. The thought of seeing Bucky again, of not having to run on borrowed time any more, is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. He pauses briefly at the threshold, and T’Challa pauses with him. He turns, and pins Steve with a knowing look. “I will leave that to your discretion, Captain,” he says softly. “As the opportunity will soon present itself.” He clasps Steve’s shoulder, squeezes once, and makes his way inside. 

 

“Yeah,” Steve says, making to follow. A swell of disbelief quiets his words. “I guess it will.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay next chapter we finally get where we're going. it's written, but i like to keep a finished buffer between updates so i'll finish the next-next chapter - which im nearly done with - and then et voila


	4. I Seek To Cure What's Inside

The first thing he sees is an empty cryo tank. His breathing stutters, and for a moment it’s like the world has condensed into a narrow tunnel, and he’s taken over by a fisheye-lens loom of thought:  _ Where is he? _

 

T’Challa’s voice filters into his ears as though from a distance, static-edged. “--Removed Mr Barnes from the Cryo-chamber shortly before we spoke,” Steve hears, and his tunnel vision broadens again, while he quietly tries to remember how to draw a full breath. T’challa lingers blithely beside him as though he hasn’t noticed that Steve has stopped dead in his tracks, though he touches his arm briefly in order to draw his attention to another doorway. “He is currently in an induced coma,” he continues, “--just through here, in order to ensure that his system is functioning as it should before we wake him.” He pauses for a moment, eyeing Steve, and adds: “He’s in good shape. Remarkably good shape, considering what he has undergone.” 

 

_ Well _ , Steve thinks,  _ That’s something.  _ He nods. There’s an awful churning in his gut, and he doesn’t quite trust himself to speak past it. His feet move onward almost without thought, and he hesitates just before the door. He swallows with an audible click, something dry catching in his throat.

 

T’challa, too, pauses at the threshold. “Captain,” he begins, his words reinforced with a palpable sincerity. “Mr Barnes has a place in Wakanda for as long as he may need or desire one.” He looks levelly at Steve, and offers him a hand. “As do you.” T’Challa holds Steve gaze for a long moment as he tries to process all the implications of that. Numbly, he reaches out and clasps T’challa’s offered hand. They shake once, firmly, the strength of T’challa’s grip matching his own. They release, and Steve’s hand drops, buzzing, to his side. 

 

With that, T’challa tucks his hands back behind his back, looks Steve over, and with a minute but definitive inclination of his head, continues through the door. Like he hasn’t just shaken Steve right down into his roots. “Quickly, now, Captain,” his voice carries back to where Steve, struck through, is still standing. “Mr Barnes is waiting. And I think he has been kept waiting for long enough.” 

 

So he has. 

 

Steve rallies, and walks through the door. There is a quiet music playing, though Steve can’t quite pinpoint where it’s coming from. It seems as though the very walls are producing it. It cocoons the room, low - but almost tangible at the peripheral of his senses. Like when you’re lulled to sleep by your own pulse, thrumming steady in your ears. 

 

And there he is, hair spilling like some fairytale damsel across his pillow. 

 

The room is lined with monitoring equipment, and Bucky’s hooked up to so many machines that Steve can hardly see him under all the mess. The music doesn’t drown the various mechanical sounds out, but it establishes a sense of calm that underscores them. It makes Steve think back to his own stint in hospital after bringing down the Helecarriers. The first thing he’d processed, upon waking, was the smell. That harsh, stripped down scent of antiseptic and bleach blistering up his sinuses. If not for the incongruous music playing at his bedside, he’d have been dumped back into his old body, hard for breath and watching a nurse pull a sheet over the wasted face of his mother. He probably would have come to gasping, in the throes of a psychosomatic asthma attack if not for Sam’s low jazz filtering through it. He can’t imagine what kind of memories Bucky would be thrown back into. He’s glad someone thought of it. He wishes he had, before now.

 

He listens with half an ear, though he doesn't recognise the song, and drinks in the sight of Bucky. His skin still too tight over his bones, but he looks touched over with warmth in a way he didn’t before. In a way he probably hasn’t for a long time. Steve still remembers the sickly pale of the Winter Soldier’s skin, near grey where it had been hidden under the muzzle. The greasepaint around his eyes marking a stark contrast, one that lent his eyes an arctic cast. Turned them inhumanly bright, and cold in the way of a fell predator.  

He looks alive, now, like he’s sleeping easy. His chest rises and falls steadily under Steve’s eyes. 

 

He notes that Bucky’s stubble has grown, just a little, in the space between cryo and Steve’s arrival. The stubble is something Steve has yet to get used to, on Bucky. Although he’d sported some for a brief period during the war, it had only lasted until he could get his hands on a shaving kit. Before it all, he’d been as meticulous as circumstance had allowed with his shaving regimen. 

 

Sometimes, before Bucky had shipped out, Steve’d watched, carefully, from the corner of his eye as he moved through his morning routine. He’d wear a white singlet most days - similar, Steve notes, to the one he’s wearing now - but sometimes he’d forego a shirt entirely, and those were the days that Steve couldn’t trust himself to watch. There would be a towel draped over his shoulder, and his hair in a loose swathe across his forehead. It hung in his eyes, and he’d brush it back absently every now and then, just for it to tumble down again. Steve wouldn’t likely admit to the few furtive sketches of he’d done of the angle of Bucky’s jaw - cast hard in the early light, and in beautiful contrast to the coiled muscle in his shoulders, back, and arms - but they could be found folded small and shoved in secretive places. The ones he could explain away as impersonal, just faceless figure-drawings, he usually kept at the very back of his sketchbook, and stashed the more incriminatingly intimate ones under his mattress. Most of them, in hindsight, were stashed under his mattress. Or should’ve been.

 

Every morning, Bucky would stand before their bathroom mirror, in their dreary apartment, and lather his face up in foam, body canted over the sink, and shave. Steve’d complained a couple times about the lingering aftershave that hung in air after he finished. He claimed it made his nose itch. It had, when they first started living together, because Steve - having lived with just his mother for as long as he could remember, and not having much need in the way of aftershave himself - wasn’t used to the acerbic strength of it like Bucky was. But he’d acclimatized to it enough to notice when Bucky forewent it, or switched up the brand. He’d brought it up once, all casual like, when he’d noticed a new scent distinct in the air a couple mornings in a row. 

 

“A dame I was seeing a while back -- you remember Bonnie, dontcha? -- Anyway, she gave me a bottle’ve somethin’ she said she liked the smell of better,” Bucky’d explained, shrugging a shoulder at him and eyeing the reflected razor at his cheek. At Steve’s noncommittal;  _ “Sure,” _ he’d continued -“Yeah, well,” wiping it on the towel over his shoulder and cutting his eyes up to catch Steve’s, lingering where they shouldn’t. “Finished my old bottle. Didn’t want hers going to waste.”

  
  


That should’ve been that, and was - by all given accounts. But if Steve noticed that old, familiar smell wafting out of the bathroom the next morning, well. He didn’t say anything, and neither did Bucky. That’s all there was to it. That’s all that could be to it.

  
  


Steve still associates that crisp, mentholated scent with Bucky, and those mornings, and with the clenching pit in his stomach. He’d looked for the brand Bucky’d used when he came out of the ice, but found, to his dismay, that it had been discontinued. Someone at Shield - and  _ god _ , he hopes it wasn’t a HYDRA agent - must’ve taken pity on him after scanning through his browser history, dismal as it must’ve been, cos a vintage bottle of it had shown up in his bathroom. Under his outrage - and not a small degree of discomfort - regarding the invasion of privacy, he’d been a  _ little _ gratified. For one, he now knew for certain he was being monitored, and for two, he was just pathetically relieved to have  _ some _ element of familiarity, however small. However uncomfortable. 

 

He didn’t use it, though. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. He picked up some cheap store brand thing for that. 

 

On particularly bad mornings, of which there were more than a few, he would just leave the bottle open in the bathroom and let the scent drift through his apartment. 

 

The serum had amped up his sense of smell, along with everything else, and he could make out a whole world of depth in that damned aftershave that he’d never even caught a hint of before. How badly he’d wanted, sitting at his single chair in his lonely kitchen, to catch a glimpse of Bucky, through a gap in the bathroom door, left ajar. How badly he wanted to close his eyes and hear the scrape of that old tortoise-shell straight-razor against new stubble, and to breathe in menthol laced through with flavours of citrus, with a few subtle traces of cinnamon, with a warm oaky touch which cut the sharpness of scent and lent it a heady masculinity that made something in his chest  _ tighten _ . 

 

He wanted - then, now,  _ for as long as he can remember _ \- to tuck his face into Bucky’s neck and breathe it, him, in. To be inundated in  _ this _ ,  _ only this _ .  _ This _ being approximate to what yearning must smell like.  _ This _ being something he could never quite get quite enough of, if he even got a grasp on it in the first place.

  
  


“There is a chair at his bedside, if you wish to sit.” Comes a new voice, and Steve startles - he’d been so preoccupied by Bucky that he hadn’t noticed Shuri cloistered around with machines, in the far corner of the room. She’s prodding at them with a thoughtful furrow between her eyebrows. Somehow, she’s just as young as he remembers. “Shuri,” he says, voice warming. “I didn’t see you there.” She smiles at him and tweaks her eyebrows up in an amused manner. 

 

“Yes, I noticed,” she says, and with some small gesture conjures up a holographic display from her wristband. “Before you go back to making eyes at him,” She nods at Bucky, “I would like to show you something.” She beckons Steve over, and with a last rake of his eyes over Bucky’s prone form, he goes to her. 

 

It’s then that a Dora Milaje that Steve recognises, but can’t put a name to, approaches T’Challa and speaks quietly to him. Steve pointedly looks elsewhere, trying not to listen in. T’Challa, conversely, listens to her intently before nodding once. He turns back to Steve and Shuri and makes deliberate eye-contact with both of them. The Dora Milaje marches back out of the room, and T’Challa excuses himself momentarily after. “This will not take long,” he assures both of them, though Steve has a feeling it’s more for his benefit than Shuri’s. “I will be back soon.”

 

“Go be king, brother,” Shuri says, making a shooing gesture at him.  “I will take care of this.” 

 

“Here, Captain.” She flips the display with a twitch of a finger and Steve sees a male form tagged over with scribbled commentary. The left arm is outlined in red, and he sees several pinpointed areas in it, as well as two in the central mass of his torso, and one more at the point at which his skull meets his spine. 

 

He feels a cold pit form in his stomach. “What,” he asks, already knowing the answer, “Are those?” 

 

Shuri looks at him astutely. “They are what you would call ‘ _ kill switches _ ’,” she tells him. “Or, they were, before we dealt with them.” 

 

Steve’s throat is closing over. “What would they--” he can’t finish the sentence, though the thought runs riots through his mind. Like her brother, Shuri does not comment on his sudden incapacitation. Her eyebrows draw low over her eyes, but that’s the only acknowledgement of his vulnerability that she gives. 

 

“These,” She zooms in on the outlined arm, “Were intended to release electrical surges - the charges would have travelled throughout his body, amplified by the metal reinforcements present throughout his skeletal system.” The hologram shifts, and now the skeletal structure of the figure is visible. Steve can see that an upper portion of the spine, the entire collarbone and left shoulder, as well as a few of the upper left ribs have the same red outline as the arm. “That’s where--?” He trails off, finding his throat is still too tight to talk. Despite this, she manages to gather the thread of what he doesn’t say.

 

“Yes.” The hologram shifts back. “These other points - the ones in his brain and torso, were reserves of a specially compounded poison. The ones in his torso were lower doses. I believe they were intended to  _ incapacitate _ , rather than  _ eliminate _ .” She pauses, then, and looks at Steve. “The one in his brain would have been fatal, if it had not malfunctioned. All of them were intended to be activated remotely.” 

 

He processes that. “They tried to activate it? The one in--,” his jaw spasms with the effort he is putting towards not grinding his teeth to chalk. “--In his brain?” She nods, her mouth forming a grim line. 

 

“To be honest,” she says, “It was not surprising that it malfunctioned so thoroughly. It’s incredibly rudimentary engineering.” 

 

Steve breathes in and holds it until he feels less like punching a hole through the wall. His hands are shaking, so he tucks them into fists and focuses on the bite of his nails into his palms. There’s only one thing to say to that. “Fuck,” he grits out on the exhale, and unclenches one hand to knead at the back of his neck. 

 

“Yes.” Shuri agrees. “No longer a threat, regardless. Besides the physical aspects, we also eliminated several neural triggers. It’s a miracle,” she swipes through the hologram and it disappears, light retreating back into her wristband. “That he was able to defect at all. I did not think it would be possible for someone to overcome the degree of conditioning that we found evidence of. Honestly, I am not sure how he managed it.” 

 

“You’d have to ask him,” Steve replies, turning back to look at Bucky. “I don’t know either.” 

 

But he does. He’s pretty damn sure he does. 

 

_ He knew me. _ Steve thinks, watching Bucky breathe.  _ Past everything, at the end of the line. He knew me.  _

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hand to god he actually wakes up next chapter


	5. Long Forgotten Words

 

“Is there anything else I need to know?” Steve asks. He knows he’s being rude, but he can’t keep his full attention on Shuri. His eyes keep turning back to Bucky, a compass needle to north.

 

“Well,” she says, “Yes. But nothing immediately pressing. It would be best, actually, if it kept until I am able to speak to both of you directly.” 

 

She slips past Steve and he turns to see her standing at Bucky’s bedside, a slim tablet having appeared in her hand. He can see the screen over her shoulder, when he manages to will his feet into moving. Shuri glances at him and gestures towards Bucky with the tablet, “All his vitals are good,” she says, tapping through a scrolling array of - what appears to Steve as - largely incomprehensible jargon. “Brain activity has normalised -  _ optimised _ , really.” She turns a blinding smile on him, and taps a closed fist against his shoulder “He’s ready. Are you?” 

 

And that’s the question, isn’t it? Of course he’s not ready. There’s no way to be ready for something like this. Of course, Steve’s whole life has been a series of events that he hasn’t been ready for. At some point you have to accept that you’re almost never ready. You just have to be able to stand up and take it as it comes. That’s as close to  _ readiness _ as you can really get.

 

“No.” He says, just to watch her face twist into a frown, and then, letting the Captain bleed into his voice just a little: “Let’s do this.” 

 

She gives him a narrow look before her trademark grin returns with full force. She levels a finger at him, “Ah, you nearly had me going for a moment there, Captain.” 

 

“Call me Steve,” he tells her, and moves to stand at the head of the bed. “What do I need to do?” 

 

Shuri tucks the tablet back into a port built into the bed-frame and rubs her hands together, lacing her fingers and stretching them out in front of her. Steve represses a twitch at the crack of her knuckles. Her smile has taken on a ready edge and her eyes are bright as they scan over Bucky. “Watch and learn,  _ Steve _ .” 

 

Shuri swipes up her holographic display again and though Steve can see what she is doing, understanding it is still beyond him. He hears, though, a fresh whirring of machinery in response to whatever it is. The machines around the room sound among themselves and Steve hears more than sees a change in Bucky. The rhythm of his breathing changes - unnatural steadiness of induced sleep coming off kilter. It picks up, his chest rising and falling in newly stuttering increments. For a moment, it seems like he can’t breathe properly. Steve looks sharply up at Shuri, but she’s carefully drawing some unidentified liquid into a syringe. His hands flex in his lap as Bucky struggles to draw a full breath and his mind is racing -  _ Surely she’d know if something was wrong - But his breathing - Is something happening? - Is this supposed to happen - What’s WRO-- _

 

_ “ _ Steve,” Shuri says, setting the syringe on a tray and leaning over Bucky to press her palm against Steve’s chest. “I need you to take a deep breath,” She breathes in exaggeratedly - “Come on, with me. He is  _ fine _ . You’re  _ both _ fine.”

She presses a little to prompt the inhale, giving him an tangible rhythm to follow.  _ What the hell is wrong with you, Rogers? _ he silently berates himself.  _ He’s right here and he’s been through hell - so maybe he doesn’t come out singing. You sure as shit didn’t, and you haven’t seen half a serve of the hell he has. Get it the fuck together.  _

 

“I know,” Steve says brusquely, catching Shuri’s wrist and drawing it from his chest as gently he can. “I know it’s fine.” She slips her wrist from his grasp and neatly twists it to clasp his hand. 

 

“If it isn’t,” she tells him in a voice that would be soft, if not for its irrepressible analytical edge. She’s scanning her eyes over him like she’s trying to look past the superficial surface and through to the crossed wires and misaligned gears that are the cause of all his strife. “That would- be _okay_.” 

 

His head dips a little, against his will. He swallows and while his throat is still tight in the way of a curbed asthma attack, he’s more than used to the feeling. It’s barely peripheral, these days. “Shuri.” He says, and it’s firm. “It is." He's quiet for a moment, and she's still running her eyes over him like she's trying to hack his mainframe with her _eyes,_ so he adds: "And if it _isn’t_ , it’s going to be.” 

 

Of course,  _ that’s _ moment Bucky chooses to chime in. 

 

“Je- _sus_ , Rogers. You don’t got it in you to quit, do you?” 

 

His voice is surprisingly full-throated, given that he’s spent the last couple of months cryogenically frozen, defrosted, and placed in a medically induced coma. In that order. Steve couldn’t say why he was expecting something raspier, but that same old drawl from way back when catches him entirely by surprise. He sounds more like he used to than he did before he went under. His voice had still been his, but without some indefinable rhythm. There had been a shift in his cadence that made it sound like he was reading someone else’s words out loud when he spoke.

Steve’d first noticed that with the Howlies.  _ Sergeant Barnes  _ been a role just as surely as  _ Captain America _ had been. Is.  

 

He’s not sure when he stopped expecting to hear Bucky’s own voice to come out when he opened his mouth. He didn’t even realise he had, till it blindsided him. _Once a sniper,_ he supposes in a distant little thought. There seems, in this moment, to be a distinct disconnect between his cacophony of thought and his physical body. Like his head is hanging ten feet up and to the left of his shoulders. 

 

He shakes his head numbly, equal parts in answer and to try and shrug off the depersonalised fog that is leaching the colour from the edges of his vision. “Hey, Buck.” He manages. Grapples with all the different words tryna spill up and out. He goes with what he knows, and it feels a little like something born in those back alleys, a flavour of flat on his back with the wind knocked outta him. “Hate to wake you, but beauty sleep can only do so much for a mug like yours.” Theres a sepia tinged old-growth in his chest, and everything he wants - and can't bring himself - to say is tamped down under its roots. It's a fight in which he finds himself newly oppositional. 

 

Bucky has yet to actually fully open his eyes, but he huffs a laugh, cracking them to narrow in on Steve. “Can’t improve upon perfection.” 

 

“Debatable,” says Shuri before Steve can chime in. She injects the syringe into an IV line and Bucky shudders a little as it enters his bloodstream. “S’cold,” he tells her, eyes blinking fully open and immediately squinting again against the light. He takes a few moments to adjust, but its not long before he's looking actively around the room, though blinking rapidly, and his eyes watering with the fresh influx of sensory information. She pats his arm with exaggerated sympathy. His hair is greasy and a bit rumpled and his eyes are open, and bright, and, all of a sudden, looking at Steve. Bucky is  absolutely the most perfect thing he’s ever seen. Steve's an old hand at this, so biting back on his fervent agreement doesn’t come easy, per se, but little about this kinda thing does. It’s a sort of muscle memory. Like raising your fists to guard your face, feet planted a shoulders width apart. Because Bucky might be about the loveliest thing he’s ever laid eyes on but that’s not new, and voicing it has never suited either of them.

 

He volleys back gamely, but there’s a tremor running through him that underscores the meagre archness he can muster. “Better keep telling yourself that, pal. If it helps you sleep at night.” 

 

Bucky, being Bucky, and knowing Steve as he does - as he does _again_ \- catches on that Steve’s edges are near to shaking loose. So he softens, in their old way, the one that use to rub Steve’s hackles backwards. “Reckon I’ve slept long enough,” he says all  _ low _ . Like Steve can’t see through it to the weariness that already has his eyelids dragging down. Steve lets him have it, though. Old habits. Resisting Bucky - when he talks in  _ that _ tone with  _ those _ eyes - isn’t something he has in him right now.

 

“I know something about that,” he concurs, though noncommittally, and finds it in himself to sit down in a chair which, despite being Wakandan made and therefore probably engineered to a ridiculously high degree, shares a few key traits common to hospital chairs the world over. It is made of some kind of cold, moulded plastic, it is somehow both too low and too high for practicality, and it is incredibly uncomfortable. “But, uh, it could be said that you’re-- owed some downtime.” 

 

Bucky snorts like Steve has a point and lifts a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, and it’s like a switch has been flicked. His eyes snap wide - settling on the empty space at his left side. “Guess all --  _ that _ really happened, then,” he murmurs - more to himself than to the room. “Feels like I could move it, if I really tried. Even though there’s nothing there.” 

 

Shuri interjects, “That could be arranged,” she tells him. “But we will talk about it a little later, yes? For now, I need you to answer some questions for me.” 

 

Bucky’s eyes flicker away from and back to Steve. The prolonged and steady eye contact should probably feel a little uncomfortable, but it doesn’t. It just feels like something Steve wants to keep. “Fire away,” Bucky tells her. Steve can see her looking between the two of them with an amused expression that shifts first into something more obscure, before she hones in on the tablet and takes on a distinct air of focus. 

 

“How do you feel?” she asks, and then clarifies, “Physically?” 

 

Bucky turns thoughtful, eyes tracking downwards. His lips part and he touches the tip of his tongue to his front teeth. It’s something he’d always done when turning a thought over in his mind, and seeing it touches something in Steve - it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s something that has remained, after everything, the same. 

 

“Like I need to stretch,” he says eventually. 

 

Shuri nods and jots something down, “Any notable soreness? Numbness, tingling?” 

Bucky casts her a half-lidded look and says, wry, “Define sore.” 

 

She makes a face at him, and Steve, through a harsh jolt in his gut, prods Bucky’s flank - making sure to exert barely enough pressure for the touch to even register, let alone hurt. “Don’t be a jerk,” he says, “Let her do her job.” 

 

Bucky swats at him, and Steve feels the momentary brush of Bucky’s hand, and curled fingers, against the back of his all the way to his core, branching the through the far reaches of him like mercury poured into an ant-hill.

“Simmer down, punk,” Bucky rolls his eyes, though there’s a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Shuri quirks an eyebrow at him and taps a finger meaningfully against the rim of the tablet. Bucky shrugs his right shoulder. “Nothing worth noting.” He tells her, and his tone says he’s done elaborating. Steve barely registers the minute inch of his hand towards where Bucky’s has settled. He almost startles when he makes contact, the tip of his middle finger bare against Bucky’s knuckle. There is what feels to be a physical kindling of electricity in that touch, at first just a frisson, but it quickly becomes something that throws sparks. 

 

Bucky’s eyelashes flicker, though he doesn’t look down. His finger twitches slightly, and Steve almost yanks his hand away, a hot flush crashing over his head, shame cut with a rejection. Before he can, Bucky shifts. His fingers overlap Steve’s, curling just barely into the gaps between them. Steve keeps his eyes fixed on Shuri’s tablet as the contact thrums up his arm. This should be such a small thing, but it overcomes him. The heat remains, but it is something else, now.

 

At Bucky’s distinctly lackluster response, Shuri’s mouth flattens. It’s momentary, and loosens as she takes in the residual heat in Steve’s face, and the tenuous link between them. She inclines her head as if to say,  _ your call.  _

 

“There is much ground to cover, Mr Barnes,” she says clinically, but her eyes are soft between Steve and Bucky. “But I have enough to go on until tomorrow. I will check in with you later.” And with that, she tucks the tablet back into the bed-frame and after taking a minute to prod at some of the machines, she leaves. She casts a look over her shoulder at the two of them as she crosses the threshold, and Steve sees her wink.

He can't tell who it's directed at. 

 


End file.
